Introduction

After some time using R and SQL server as two different tools (not 100% true because I already have imported data from SQL Server into R Studio), now Microsoft is offering as part of the SQL Server 2016 R services. That seems to be very promising, especially for Microsoft BI professionals. One of the advantages is to keep analytics close to data and use an integrated environment.

In this post I will show some basic operations and how to get started with these technologies. I took most of the R code from this Microsoft walkthrough that I highly recommend to you:

In both histograms you can easily identify outliers and we have a better understanding about the distribution of the data. Here is where R plays an important role (as a tool). This kind of analysis is not performed by many BI professionals, or at least this is what I have seen in my professional life.

Summary

In this post I demonstrated how we can get data into R client from SQL Server and perform some basic analysis over a simple dataset. What would be the next steps?

Continue visualizing the data

Create a machine learning model

Integrate the R code in SQL Server using functions and stored procedure